So Guilds of Ravnica Didn’t get Charms?

Arran Sahota | 22nd October 2018

So with our return of our return to Ravnica having been out a few weeks there have been some interesting shifts in the meta as standard gets a new lease of life.

For people who don’t know, in the Return to Ravnica block there was a cycle of charms which each guild got, they each had three choices on but you can only choose one. In Guilds of Ravnica the five guilds that came out were Selesnya, Boras, Golgari, Izzet, and Dimir but none of them got charms or anything of the sort.
There could be many reasons that they did not include these charms, maybe they thought they would be too strong in standard or maybe there were thoughts of having two charms for the same guild house being too powerful for other formats.

Although strangely some of these have never seen hard play and some have. If you play Modern, you’ll be familiar with Boros Charm.
Izzet Charm sees little play, except maybe a one-off in Blue Moon style decks but nothing as big as Boras Charm.
Golgari Charm is slowly coming back in as B/G rock decks in Modern get bigger, and will be played in sideboards to deal with token threats, Destroy Enchantment (Leyline of Sanctity).
Dimir Charm I have never seen in Modern, maybe a bit of Commander? The removal side doesn’t seem that good as Black has a lot of kill spells, Counter Sorceries maybe isn’t that big but could catch people out, then the last one could be really good in current standard as it helps you fill your graveyard like in the B/U Surveil deck.
Selesnya Charm is a charm I have never seen anywhere, pump a creature and give it trample, other cards do that so that seems important, Exiling a big Creature this one could be used to kill Gurmag Angler(UglyFish) that’s good right? Or maybe too narrow of options.
Every time there is a cycle of cards they’re not all going to be balanced and some are going to shine more than others, some disappear into commander decks and never see much play.

I was kind of hoping for another cycle of these cards to bring some different gameplay to the format and also make really good draft cards. If they’re not in this set chances are we won’t see any in the future Ravnica guilds.

My questions are to you guys, do you believe that these cards with different options are too strong for a smaller format?